Here's the latest episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast featuring Mr Daniel Ingram as the guest. We discuss a wide range of topics in cluding the future of awakening, the suppor tor lack of for up and coming teachers, taboos and myths in Buddhism surrounding enlightenment, the poltiics of it all, Dan's model and much more.

Click here for it: 7.3 Super Groovy Daniel Ingram Interview

Thanks for posting! I was struck by Daniel's speaking about MCTB 2, which will eventually be published, although there still is no date. But it's good to know it's on its way.

I also was struck by Daniel's emphasis on morality and concentration as essential trainings for beginners, as opposed to starting out with dry insight. I recall my own practice being dry for the first two paths, leading to some miserable dukkha nyanas. For third path I worked on jhanas. The other part of the interview that resonated with my experience was Daniel's extensive discussion of what to do post 4, and his clarification of the kinds of problems that can persist in people's lives at that stage.

The entire segment is very dense, without much by way of pauses or repetition, so listen when you are most able to focus. 

what was the hokai joke :'(

There's not really a joke, there's Daniel encouraging Hokai to get back in the game of disseminating wisdom and his finding the whole procedure rather shameful and humourous. Hokai's a pretty private dude after all.

if you have suffering episodes as much often and many as fast you defeat them it will change you quaranteed. No sweettalk can help, because few moments later the fire returns. Awareness or mindfulness will become that way, no sleep can't help either, if there is possibility that the fire is about to go off you will do the neccesary thing on half awake to keep the fire burning.

If there is a thought that you will go new place it adds so much fuel that OMG.

What helps is to do bad deeds it will put your fire off but then remorse will fire it up again. Like wtf i have done, im stupid stupid stupid.. mantra will fire you up.

Its not possible to prepare for it in advande, you may know that ther ewill be suffering even during the suffering time you may tell it is impermanet but it deosn't help it to go off, you need to make it itense as possible so it goes away quicker.

Its noobs an beginners who need to have lot of effort to get the fire going, even perhaps a year. BEGINNERS.

edit:i am now better, tnx for the dharma.

The editorship of this interview has the most skill and insight I've ever seen in any other podcast, webcast or interview of this genre. Very nice!

Your comment is not at all clear fella.

(as a side note the interviews are good)
I have watched two podcasts posted here i get the notion there that enlightenment is not mystical that its normal.

Im against that. Like there still are lots of stuff stuck in the closet. If to touch them then immediate ban will land, so you need to hold back your toungue feeling still there. Imagine there really are lots of stuff to be told but no mystic will tell them because who want to risk with their lives.

no freedom at all.

Sorry, to say it again but your language is fuddled and confusing though the second
comment is a lot clearer so I’ll write a response. I think that any questions about the ontology
of enlightenment are secondary to questions regarding our relationship with
concepts of enlightenment, which is to say, any discussion about what
enlightenment ‘really is’, is limited firstly by the language we use, the
religious/spiritual baggage we buy into from whatever tradition attracts us and
the limits to how we can know whether our subjective claims, or those of others,
are real or simply wishful thinking. We can talk
about human phenomena and we can talk about what happens at the edges but the rest….that’s
where faith comes in, and it’s the sort of faith I tend not to be fond of. It
seems wise to me to start with what we can know rather than the so-called mystical
stuff. There are just way too many spiritual folks making outrageous claims
that have no place in the shared world we inhabit. There are way too many folks
making fantastical claims who then end up being cult leaders, frauds, scammers
or folks of dubious character. You don’t need the woo woo to explain what’s going
on. You don’t need the woo woo factor at all and if it’s there, so what, what’s
shared, human and tangible is far more valuable in the long-term. You can have the
human freedoms with or without the woo woo.  If you don’t like the idea of a humanist model
of enlightenment, or if it doesn’t meet whatever your expectations or desires
would wish it to be, that’s probably a very valuable thing to sit with. At the
end of the day, wading your way through all the mystical bullshit to find your
basic humanity is not a bad way to go.

If you think of woo woo claims that people can move objects with their minds, then that could be not that wrong, because when you look at objects then at somepoint they seem to move. In my case now just watched and they are moving. So now if to add inexperience and deludedness, i would get exited and think i now can move object using my mind.

Shadow people, ghosts, what people claim to see from their corners of eyes. Its an ordinary eye phenomena. Flashes of lights, blue balls, shooting stars on your own vision even a black hole with electrical borders.
...
Things get not so ordinary if to think that your body is a microcosmos of macrocosmos but when you turn your senses inwards then its opposite, so you have an earth in your body.. mystic path.

I'm loosing the plot wih a few of the comments on this:

Daniel M Ingram talked about the book wot he wrote, the two interwiever dudes had some 'hey look at us we do dharma stuff' vibe going on, and while it was clealry expertly edited (no pauses at all) i think DMI had the chance to express himself. What i picked up on was not the content, but the joy of existence, DMI did not loose himself in giggles but he was there, laughng at the questions and also his own answers.

Me i'll follow that example.

but then what do i know....
--
Dumnkopf Kaput Teapot III

I absolutely agree! 

So, non-duality is not in the secular humanist ballpark. It's not properly describable in symbolic language. It's "woo woo". It's also your first stop, and probably last stop, on the enlightenment train - though I'm happy to be corrected by someone with more experience than me.

I spent years talking about it smugly with my book full of buddhist classics and favorites assuming it was an everyday world phenomenon, and I didn't know AT ALL what I was talking about, because it ISN'T something that you'll ever understand because you read a book, or someone told you about it. Maddeningly, all that anyone who has seen it can share about it is that they can't properly describe it, can't tell you exactly why it implies all of the crazy non-science ideas they now believe are true, and that you'll get it when you see it.

There are a number of assumptions in your post I find problematic. Before I repsond to them though, I should make it clear that here or in the podcast, neither I nor Stuart are interested in preaching or converting anyone to our way of thinking, critiquing and looking at the world. If you're happy or find a particular set of beliefs and practices work for you, so be it. Do you hang out in exquisite states of bliss, great. Since I posted here to start the ball rolling, I do feel a certain duty to respond to the more coherent comments, so will share a few thoughts, which you may or may not find relevent.

I do think that there are a number of points worth making but they are obviously partial as your comment was quite vague. Non-duality conceived of as a thing is generally problematic. The idea that there is an 'it' that a few special folks get to glimpse is problematic. If no one can describe the 'it' you refer to, then there is no 'it'; there are rather experiences that are beyond words that may or may not be similiar amongst those who claim to experience them. The results of such experiences can be discussed, described and understood to be useful or escapist, temporary or long-term, features of one's subjective landscape only or shared aspects of human potential, and so on. My experience ha shown that by talking about what it tangible, the intangible becomes clearer, more easily understood and pointed to.

I've had first-hand experience of enough spiritual highs, lows, peaks, troughs to appreciate how much is going on and how loaded so many conceptions or spiritual/religious/awakening experience are to know that perennial views are self-serving and inherently flawed. At the end of the day, the everyday world and the rest are inseperable as there's nowhere to go, so whatever enlightenment experiences one has, our basic, shared humanity remains as does our physiology, and will do so until we die. Any form of absolutes in terms of spiritual accomplishments also seem problematic for many of the reasons Daniel points out in the podcast episode.

"You'll get it when you see it" sounds like a bad ad campaign that I've heard way too often but if you think you've seen 'it' and are somehow better, freer because of it, good for you. See how it looks ten years down the line, or when/if you have kids screaming at you, your body's breaking down, death is at the door, someone mugs you, or some other real world event comes knocking. I repeat what I posted before, too many of the folks who claim to live freely, non-dually, at one with god or whatever version is hot at the moment, end up revealing how deeply flawed they are when money or sex scandals turn up, or more straight-forwardly, reveal how fragile their sense of it all is, how shitty they are, how poor they are at dealing with conflict or the narratives that don't match their own.

I'm not interested in what's special anymore. I'm interested in what's shared and what's humn and the places where we can meet.

First, let me apologize if what I've said is threatening to your beliefs, or sounds insulting. It's in no way intended to be. I'm merely representing things as my experience has demonstrated them. If it makes you more comfortable you can call them beliefs - but they aren't anything I have any doubts about or "believe" per se. 

There is nothing "special" about my experiences. Ironically, the experience is that everything is just as it always was. It's not a separate "experience" - merely seeing what is always, and has always been there. There are many here who have had this experience long before I did. I count myself as fortunate to have had these people as a resource here over the last 6 months or so. This experience is available to anyone, and there are instructions for getting there everywhere. I'm not unique, by any means.

If you read the literature, as I'm sure you have, you'll find that this isn't something we are going to explain properly with words - that EVERYONE who tries to explain what "it" looks like has trouble - and this trouble goes back thousands of years. Talking about getting there (or reading about it) won't get you there. Practice might. Looking at it all through the lens of secular humanism isn't going to alter the basic instructions for enlightenment or results of following them.

I don't make any of your claims. I'm not an arhat, or enlightened - I just have a perspective. It doesn't look like you have the same one. That's OK. Consider that there are no concrete reasons for my perspective to make you so seemingly bitter or rigid toward me - a stranger. You don't know me - I can see that my personal experience presses your buttons. It's not intentional. Feel free concentrate on what you are driven to concentrate on, and the best of luck pursuing it... really. 

Oh... and I have teenagers and an ex-wife. Yes, things are markedly easier due to my experience as well as my continuing practice.

Now, you’re making a little more sense. It’s easy to forget how easy it is to misunderstand or be misunderstood in these short exchanges. The second paragraph involves you describing something that I can relate to and make sense of. In fact, by removing the specialness, the ‘itness’ that you hinted at previously as a thing somewhere, you’ve described a fairly common take on what happens when a person breaks from identifying with a separate self and liberates their psychic and emotional energies. Great.

Now you're making a lot more sense (I've added a smily face to show I'm not experiencing negative emotions) I’m actually not that interested in the ‘literature’ you mention in the third paragraph, but personal descriptions after the fact or a few years down the line are actually very important, especially if they come from intelligent folks willing to think outside the box and not frame their spiritual experiences within the pre-existing frameworks i.e. the literature or their teacher’s descriptions. The point I was attempting to make is that in trying to describe experience and give form and sense to these initially indescribable experiences, we can actually produce useful, helpful and evolved descriptionsof spiritual experience that open up such experiences to the refinement of practice. This process also allows advanced practitioners of Buddhism, or similar, to recognise where they may still be holding on to subtle patterns of selfing or reactivity. This is one of the reasons we still practice, right? If you give up on the perfection of self model, then I, and no one else, is perfect, life is always in movement and we are all evolving as we are slowly ageing and dying. Articulating our experiences, however ephemeral or beyond words, is a practice and discipline that I consider to be of value. It’s an intellectual compliment to the sensorial and perceptual dimensions of practice. I don’t assume it’s for everyone or should be.

The interview we did with Adrian Ivakhiv, which precedes Daniel’s, is indirectly an attempt to formulate a worldview that more accurately describes the reality of living after decoupling from the continuity of a separate self but without relying on spiritual paths or idioms. As I aminterested in the meeting points between our western intellectual tradition and Buddhism beyond the sciences and the latest buzz about MFRMI scans, I have found that drawing from philosophy and anthropology and even the arts, concepts, words and ways of looking at the world to be useful. I gleefully discovered that there are folks far more intelligent than I doing this already and we mention some of them in the podcast. I repeat, this is obviously not an enterprise for everyone and neither should it be. I do consider it to be an invaluable part, however, of formulating a more robust form of western Buddhism. I also believe, yes believe, that in challenging the limits of our ability to describeexperience and give it a name, we open up those experiences to potentially becoming more available to the wider world. This is potentially part of a modern Bodhisattva’s path. I also believe that ongoing practice after 1st, 2nd paths, etc, is about full commitment to the sensorial field/landscape we awake to each day and that this field spreads to encompass more of our world and that in that process we are challenged by the dichotomies of our very human existence. Holding too tightly onto enlightenment experiences tends to act as a shield from those dichotomies.

I could say more but hopefully I’ve been clearer this time round as you have been. As for the personal stuff you mention, you might be reading into things there. Bitterness is great word though.

Thanks for this post and @Daniel - simply excellent.  Thanks

tom

We're here to communicate, right? Why else waste our time? Certainly there is no point in ego comparison, or scripture knowledge - you can argue to your hearts content lots of other places on the internet - that's not why I come here.

Anybody who is fulll of therir "specialness" about this, doesn't get it, IMHO. This set of changes are available to everyone, though the ability to achieve it might be different in each instance. 

I still identify as a separate self, though I have the knowledge ("belief" if it makes you more comfortable) to know this is a falsehood though a "woo woo" experience where I got to see what things actually look like (again, my "belief"). Complete loss of this identity is probably one of the last steps on this path, is my personal guess, but I feel it creeping along nicely.


I like being able to explore the experiences as well. It can be interesting to read the accounts of people who have had these experience outside of the traditions, but I am personally grateful to have had a framework to describe mine within. It's a very disorienting experience - I can't imagine what it would be like to have had it happen without context. Describing the experience of non-duality is great, expecting to properly render it with words is not.


Sounds great. If it drives you, pursue it. Best of luck.

Good interview. I like how Daniel is describing things these days.

As with your other podcast episodes, however, there's no need for this to be a 200MB download. 320k stereo sound file is overkill for human speech. Don't believe me? Encode it down to 64k mono and have a listen for yourself. Phenomenologically confirmable! ;)

Thanks Small Steps, you're not the first to mention the file size issue and you may be right. I'll speak to my tech buddy and get him onto it.

Corrupted beings cultivate too in order to gain knowledge and wisdom. What i think corrupted is, they talk about dharma but don't themsleves follow it in their daily activities - tiny choices are still evil, as from tiny seed can grow out a big tree and multyply easily.

In order to trancend desire realms, walk the path of pure life. Nothing excluded, if not celibate, then forget it that you escape, you won't even notice the temptations.

So if we take viewpoint of desire realms. Lot of teachers don't teach it how to trancend them, not even mentioning what to do or what to avoid in order to weed out evil.

In Mahayana Buddhism, dharmadhātu (Standard Tibetan: chos kyi dbyings; Chinese: 法界) means "realm of phenomena", "realm of Truth", and of the noumenon. It is referred to by several synonymous terms from Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, such as Tathata (Reality "as-it-is"), emptiness, dependent co-arising and eternal Buddha. It is the "deepest nature, or essence".[1]Dharmadhātu is the purified mind in its natural state, free of obscurations. It is the essence-quality or nature of mind, the fundamental ground of consciousness of the trikaya, which is accessed via the mindstream.[citation needed]When the buddha-nature has been realised, dharmadhātu is also referred to as the Dharmakāya, the Body of Dharma Truth.It is associated with Vairocana.

....

Nagarjuna[edit]Nāgārjuna wrote a treatise on the dharmadhatu, In praise of the Dharmadhatu (Skt. Dharmadhātustava).[8] According to Nagarjuna, the dharmadhatu is the ground which makes liberation possible:According to Nāgārjuna, the dharmadhatu is seen when the afflictions are purified:
,,,,

Chinese Buddhism[edit]Mahaparinirvana Sutra[edit]In the Mahayana Mahaparinirvana Sutra, the Buddha states of himself that he is the "boundless Dharmadhatu" - the Totality itself.Tibetan Buddhism[edit]Five Wisdoms[edit]The Dharmadhatu is comprehended by one of the Five Wisdoms:

• Dharmadhātu wisdom,
• Mirror-like wisdom,
• Equality wisdom,
• Discriminating wisdom,
• All-accomplishing wisdom.

Dzogchen[edit]In the Dzogchen text Gold refined from ore[9] the term Dharmadhatu is translated as 'total field of events and meanings' or "field of all events and meanings".[9]

source: wikipedia

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagarjuna

Nāgārjuna is also credited with developing the philosophy of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and, in some sources, with having revealed these scriptures in the world, having recovered them from the nāgas (water spirits often depicted in the form of serpent-like humans). Furthermore, he is traditionally supposed to have written several treatises on rasayana as well as serving a term as the head of Nālandā.[3

quote end.

Interesting, humanoids, aliens huhuhu!?